Scientists at Purdue University have recently proposed a new and somewhat hard-to-swallow explanation for a longstanding question about early hominid diets.
Tests of the bone tissue of ancient Neanderthals and Homo sapiens have consistently turned up extremely high levels of nitrogen, an element that builds up in the tissue of carnivores. The nitrogen levels in these early people are so high that they often exceed the levels of so-called hyper-carnivorous animals: the wolves and big cats that eat nothing but meat.
But humans and Neanderthals almost definitely didn’t eat that much meat: not only do we know they depended on plant foods, but hominid livers also just can’t process such large amounts of protein. So what exactly is going on here?
Well, you likely enjoy your cheese and beer and coffee, right? Those are all products of fermentation–letting your food spoil in a controlled way. The Purdue scientists theorize that our early ancestors took it one step further, from fermentation to intentional putrefaction–eating the meat they’d hunted once it had rotted. More specifically, they were likely eating the nitrogen-rich maggots that developed on that rotting meat.
The study observed human cadavers undergoing up to two years of putrefaction at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center. The team tested the rotting flesh for its nitrogen content, and then gathered the fly larvae that appeared on the flesh and tested those larvae as well. Sure enough, the maggots contained sky-high levels of nitrogen. If those larvae were a regular part of early diets, it would easily explain the amount of nitrogen in excavated Neanderthal and Homo sapiens bone.
Now, you might argue that there’s plenty of nitrogen in the Miracle-Gro you spread on your lawn, and you don’t see anyone eating handfuls of that. So you think maybe it’s not possible that ancient people would have intentionally eaten rotten meat, let alone maggots.
Well, you might be surprised by what is possible. The Purdue team got the idea to test the maggot nitrogen levels after reading about the dozens of traditional cultures that regularly ate intentionally putrefying meat and the resulting insect larvae. Early anthropological accounts are full of references to this practice, especially in far northern cultures that stored hunted meat for weeks, months, and even entire seasons, using the digestion of the larvae as a form of food preparation.
For example, when an early anthropologist expressed disgust about the Netsilik people of northern Canada eating the maggots on a caribou carcass, a Netsilik hunter said, “You yourself like caribou meat, and what are these maggots but live caribou meat? They taste just the same as the meat and are refreshing to the mouth.”
When another anthropologist complained about the smell of the rotting meat being eaten by the Yup’ik of Alaska, one of the native diners responded simply, “We don’t eat the smell.”
Even today, you can go to the Italian island of Sardinia and enjoy the delicacy known as casu marzu, a local cheese that is consumed with the larvae of cheese flies living in it. So if modern humans do it, why wouldn’t the Neanderthals? Although the study calls for further experiments with the kinds of meat that early hominids would have eaten to confirm these findings, early indications seem promising.
So, maybe this article can be more than just an informative view into the lifeways of early humans–maybe it can also serve as a how-to guide. Next time there’s a power outage at your house and all the venison in your deep freezer goes off, maybe turn lemons into lemonade, stash the meat in a nearby rockpile for a couple months, and dig in. If you can stomach it, your bones will likely be stronger for it.
Editor’s Note: We don’t recommend you eat rotten meat with or without maggots. There is a very high chance that you will get very sick.
Read the full article here